599: 10 Trends for Week 16

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J zacher.

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Speaker 2: Reson What's up everyone?

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Speaker 1: It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at fandle and at number fire dot com in this episode five hundred and ninety nine of the Late Round Podcast. The many shows that are part of the Fandel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. The NFL schedule has made me change the Late Round podcast schedule. Typically, on Tuesday morning, you'd be able to listen to a fifteen transactions episode, but with games happening on Tuesday, it makes way more sense for me to drop the fifteen transactions episode on Wednesday morning. That way we can work with as much information as possible. Waivers are pushed back a day this week anyway, so today we'll talk ten trends. I have less complete data to work with this week, but there should be enough to make it an interesting show. Now, before we get into the trends, I want to remind you about the FANDUL NFL High Low, a free to play fantasy football contest.

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Speaker 2: All you have to do is build.

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Speaker 1: Your scorecard with the teams that you think will score highest or lowest in four stack categories The closer you are to being spot on, the more points you'll get. Players with the most points each week split the prize pool in a perfect scorecard will win the jackpot. Head over to fandle dot com today and play the FanDuel High.

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Speaker 2: Low for free. Eligibility restrictions apply.

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Speaker 1: Go to fandle dot com or download the Fandle app for more details. Trend one this week is about how insanely awful Week fifteen really was on Sunday. So this doesn't count games that are played on any other day, but on Sunday, we saw forty offensive touchdowns. According to NFL Media's research department, that was the lowest total the NFL has seen on a Sunday where at least ten games were played since nineteen ninety four. Now I'm recording this before the week is over, but through Sunday's games, we had just one three hundred yard passer. For some context, Week one of the season had eleven of those passers. If it felt like your amazing fantasy football team got crushed by nobody's in Week fifteen, it's because it probably did. When most offenses aren't generating points, the players on those offenses fail, so it's sort of an equalizer, and it also makes the big performances like the ones from Gabriel Davis or Mark Andrews or the ones from Chiefs players. It makes those performances even more important, even more impactful, because it's hard to come back from them with such little offense across the league. I can confidently say that it was the worst Fantasy football week of my entire career. It was so frustrating. I've been playing fantasy for twenty years, and I've been analyzing it for nine I don't remember a single week like this one, let alone when the stakes were so high. Dak Prescott has finished as a QB two or worse than weekly scoring in four of his last five games played. During this five game stretch, he's averaging to eleven point nine Fantasy points per game. One of the things that's apparent with Prescott over this timeframe is that he hasn't been converting on his deep and intermediate throws from weeks one through ten, so his games out of this split, Prescott was throwing at fifteen or more air yards and a little over sixteen percent of his attempts. Over the last five weeks, that number has been basically the same. It's up by point four percent. The difference is how he's converted on those passes. During his first eight games or weeks one through ten, his completion rate on those throws was forty seven point eight percent. Over his last five, that's dropped all the way to twenty nine point four percent. I'd argue that this should get better just because the twenty nine percent rate is that bad. He's been hitting his intermedia in deep passes at the same rate that Sam Darnold has this year, but it absolutely makes Dak Prescott tough to trust over the next couple of weeks. This is a little teaser for the fifteen Transaction Show, but Marquez Valdez Scantling now seen at least a twenty percent target share in the Packers offense in three of his last four games, and he's given US two top ten performances during this stretch. Now, I've talked about MVS on previous fifteen Transaction shows, but he continues to have the right boom or bust profile that underdogs can take advantage of.

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Speaker 2: In the Fantasy playoffs.

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Speaker 1: Chase Claypole has now failed to hit a target chair north of ten percent and two of his last three, and according to Pro Football Focus, over this three game stretch, he's run twenty one fewer routes than Ray Ray McCloud. He ran fewer routes than McCloud in each one of those games. Claypool has a lot of talent, it just hasn't come together between the Ears yet. I would have a hard time putting him in my fantasy lineup moving forward. A huge winner in Week fifteen was Devin Singletary. He's now been a top fifteen running back in back to back weeks, but in Week fifteen, he handled ninety five point seven percent of Buffalo's running back rushes. That was by far a season high, not just for him, but for any Buffalo running back. The previous high came from Singletary in Week one, where he had a seventy three percent running back rush share. This backfield has been a mess for the majority of the season, but it does look like the Bills may be riding Singletary to the finish line. He's definitely someone worth rostering and potentially starting moving forward, especially with Buffalo getting Atlanta in Week seventeen. We should probably talk about the Arizona Cardinals backfield because Chase Edmonds is back.

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Speaker 2: He played this past week.

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Speaker 1: The Cardinals weren't productive offensively, but we still got some information on the backfield split. Now, keep in mind James Connor was a little bit banged up this past week and Edmonds is coming off an injury as well. But Connor saw two targets to Edmunds one on Sunday, and he also ran three more routes than Edmunds did. This is definitely a change versus what we had seen before edmonds injury. From weeks one through eight. According to PFF, Edmunds had one hundred and eighty routes run versus Connor's seventy five. It's a small sample size, but this is a show about and right now things are trending in the right direction for Connor.

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Speaker 2: In this split.

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Speaker 1: Backfield, things aren't nearly as good as they were without Edmonds, but if Connor keeps a receiving workload, he should still be very usable. Trend seven is about the Green Bay backfield things flip flop from week fourteen to fifteen. In Week fourteen, aj Dillon played six more snaps than Aaron Jones, and he carried the ball fifteen times to Jones' five. In Week fifteen, Jones played sixteen more snaps than Dylan, and he carried the ball thirteen times to Dylan's seven. Jones also saw more targets in both games. They're definitely dividing up that backfield, but Jones still looks like the player that you'd want most on your fantasy roster. He's got more stability as a pass catcher, and the gap in snaps this week was more dramatic than last week. I'd assume the Packers want to use Dylan to grind things out in a super positive script, but in order to get to that point, Jones will still be involved. San Francisco has now given a running back fifteen or more carries on ten separate occasions this year. And for the record, this doesn't include any Deebo Samuel stats. I'm talking about players whose positions are listed as running back. But they've had ten instances where a running back has had fifteen or more carries since they've played fourteen games. It's a rate of seventy one point four percent of their games with a back having that number of carries. During Kyle Shanahan's time as forty nine Ers head coach. Before this season, that rate has been under forty seven percent. Now. On top of that, if you look at twenty plus attempt games after Jeff Wilson's Week fifteen, the forty nine Ers now have four instances where a running back hit twenty or more carries in a game this year from twenty seventeen through twenty twenty, so since Kyle Shanahan got to San Francisco that's happened six total times. I don't know if this signals a meaningful change with how Kyle Shanahan might handle his team's backfield moving forward, because some are a lot of this may have to do with the availability of the running backs, but it's at least something to monitor and think about over the offseason. Mark Andrews is absolutely crushing it right now. He's been a top five tight end and weekly scoring in five of his last six games, averaging over twenty PPR points per game during this stretch. One of the things that I found interesting was just how consistent his workload has been this year. On the season, his lowest target share is seventeen point one percent in a single game. That's the highest in the league. A tight end by two percentage points over Travis Kelce, and then there's another two percentage point drop going to Darren Waller, who's lowest is thirteen percent. Only four wide receivers at the time of this recording have had a higher minimum target share this season than Mark Andrews. The fact that Baltimore has thrown the ball a little bit more this year, that's what's helped Mark Andrews become a monster. The last trend this week is about James Robinson. Urban Meyer is gone, and what do you know, James Robinson had his best running back rush share and target share combination of the season.

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Speaker 2: That's what happened in Week fifteen yin the Texans.

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Speaker 1: Robinson saw ninety five percent of Jacksonville's rushes, the third highest of his season. He also saw sixteen point seven percent target share, the second highest of his season. The combination of those two numbers hadn't been hit by Robinson all year long. With the Jets as their opponent in Week sixteen, Robinson is back to being an RB one that's going to do for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribe to the Late Round podcast and make sure you are by searching forward pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Thanks everyone. Once again, I'll have the fifteen Transactions episode for you tomorrow. I'll talk to you then